Tutorial 2
Replace a window scene using layers and masking skills
one of the best things about Photoshop is how it gives you the opportunity to transport people or objects from one place to another. We can replace a background or part of a photo in order to come up with new scenes that could never exist in the real world. In this project, we’ll show you one of the ways it’s done.
The fundamental feature for this technique is layers. This cornerstone of Photoshop enables us to bring in different parts of photos and then combine them with complete control. Here we simply copy the New York city scene onto our original portrait, and use layer blending skills to fit it to the empty window.
To combine our two photos we can make use of a fantastic command in Photoshop called Blend If. This enables us to blend layers by controlling the visibility of pixels based on their brightness. With a scene like our starting image, the empty window is of course made up of very bright pixels. So we can simply drop our city scene on top then use Blend If to target and replace those bright pixels with something better.
Once done, we can use a layer mask to tidy things up. Layer masks give us the ability to make parts of a layer transparent or semi-transparent. After adding a mask, we simply paint with either black to hide areas or white to reveal them. These simple controls make it possible to create all kinds of incredible composite images.